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WWW's "digerati" writing books
Don't give up on the hard copy just yet

by Elizabeth Weise
Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO - Folks on the World Wide Web are apt to disdain the print world, deriding it as painfully slow and old-fashioned.

The reign of the dead tree is over, they chortle via e-mail. The printed page will fade away, they say, and all information-sharing will be instantaneous and two-way.

If that is so, why are the digerati (digital literati) racing to get a book out?

Some of those already out of the gate include Nicholas Negroponte of MIT's famed media lab (Knopf), Steven Johnson, editor of the web magazine Feed (HarperEdge), columnist Jon Katz of the web site HotWired (HardWired) and Cyber-pundit David Shenk (HarperEdge).

All are writing words to be printed on leaves of dried wood pulp embossed with lampblack. Non-digital. Un-electronic.

Books just happen to be the hottest thing going.

"The industry that's really alive right now, that really has an audience and is profitable is the book industry," said Peter Rutten, publisher of HardWired, Wired's book division.

"The Web is producing more heat than light," agreed Eamon Dolan, senior editor at HarperCollins's new line of cyberish books, HarperEdge.

"The book is an affirmation of a technology that's been around for 400 years," he added. "This imprint is not about boosting technology."

Dolan's imprint is, however, about grabbing some of the hottest names on the Web and having them sit down to write the kind of 50,000-word treatises no one in his or her right mind would ever read on-line.

Titles like What Will Be: Our Lives in the 21st Century by Michael Dertouzos, with a foreword by a software salesman out of Seattle named Bill Gates. Or The Soul of Cyberspace by Jeffrey Zaleski, on the spiritual side of virtual reality.

It's exactly this question of word count, more than anything else, that frames the debate: long versus short, quick versus slow.

Michael Kinsley of Microsoft's web magazine, Slate, acknowledges people just won't read more than 800 or, at most, 1,000 words on a screen.

And there are things, everyone digitized is willing to admit, that take longer to say. In fact, now that the dust has settled down some, David Weir, managing director of programming at HotWired, has the most conciliatory words to offer about the print versus wired showdown.

Each, he believes, enhances the other.

"A good book is something the Web will never compete with," he said. "This is an environment that fosters the quick, current, impulsive and irreverent. Even explosive fights and conflict.

Whereas a book is a chance to thoughtfully organize a great deal of information."

So why all that trashing of the print world? It is, believes Rutten, merely a turf war.

"What you do is say, 'You're old, you're tired, you're dead.' You say, 'We're new, we're alive, we're hip.' It's the oldest way of denigrating someone."

"There is no other medium that allows for long, in-depth treatment of a subject. You're not going to listen to a radio show for 13 hours or browse a web page forever to really dig into something. There's something about books. We can never do without

them."

And yet all of these men can imagine the day when technology overcomes 400 years of tradition. Each of them sees some kind of

tablet-sized reader in the not-too-distant future that will allow readers the portability of a book with the vast resources of the Internet.

"I expect books will at some point go electronic, except in a way that we can't quite envision yet," Rutten said.

"I'm sure there are going to be highly flexible media feeding you unerasable or replaceable text and images at the same high quality that print allows now."